SHARP: A novel hybrid architecture for industrial wireless sensor and actuator networks

Industrial communications have very challenging requirements, especially in Factory Automation (FA) scenarios. Some of these requirements are: packet deadline bounds, high reliability, low transmission jitter, and communication determinism. Wireless communications solutions offer significant advantages over wired solutions: lower costs, faster and seamless deployment, higher flexibility and scalability, and free movement of the systems communicated wirelessly. However, standard wireless technologies do not provide enough performance to satisfy all of the industrial communications requirements in most cases and, therefore, wired solutions cannot be directly replaced by wireless solutions. In this work, we present SHARP (Synchronous and Hybrid Architecture for Real-time Performance in IWSAN), a novel hybrid architecture specially designed for industrial automation, where Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications (URLLC) are required. This paper is mainly focused on the wireless segment of SHARP, a wireless architecture that includes a physical layer based on 802.11g along with a Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) Medium Access Control (MAC) layer to ensure communication determinism, while maintaining backward compatibility with 802.11. Wireless SHARP segment behavior and its performance are evaluated through OMNeT++ simulations.